Re: Has anyone heard from BTR1701 today?

On 2025-01-09 9:38 PM, shawn wrote:

On Thu, 09 Jan 2025 21:03:38 -0500, EGK <memyself@null.net> wrote:
 

On Thu, 9 Jan 2025 17:13:03 -0800, suzeeq <suzeeq@imbris.com> wrote:
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On 1/9/2025 11:35 AM, danny burstein wrote:

In <rm80oj1c9filnvhokppl5afldcba1el0op@4ax.com> EGK <memyself@null.net> writes:
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On Thu, 9 Jan 2025 18:58:16 -0000 (UTC), danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com>
wrote:

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In <pu50ojla2af5rhitqg8db2labidg34qbio@4ax.com> EGK <memyself@null.net> writes:
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[snip]
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Newsom claimed there was plenty of water but reports are water mains to
fight the fires ran dry.

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If you try really, really, hard, maybe you could figure out how
opening 250 hydrants near the reserviour might cause some problems
for the ones farther downstream.

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So again, they were totally unprepared for this.

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damn, you're dumb
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Yeah, who can prepare for 80 mph wind in SoCalm in conjunction with
fire. Never happened before.

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  There was no brush management to cut and dispose of brush that fed the
fire.  They had a lack of infrastructure so water could be pumped under
pressure to higher elevations.   They cut the fire department budget by 18
million dollars.  They had evacuation plans that looks like something out of
the keystone cops.

 Given the 800 something million dollar budget I'm not sure the 18
million dollars would have made a difference. The water issue is one
that they could have dealt with BUT it would have meant spending
millions of dollars to have the pumping infrastructure to handle the
massive demand that might never have arrived. They had plenty of
pumping availability for normal usage but multiple fires at one time
all needing water to fight the fires was too much for them.
 

You may well be right. One of my friends retired recently but he was an engineer that was involved in many projects around the world, including some bridges. He told me the standard for building a bridge was to make it strong enough to withstand the harshest conditions of rain, ice, snow and wind that had occurred in 100 years, which is frequently called a "century storm". But that isn't the worst storm that has EVER happened. For any century storm, there are probably once-in-500-year storms and once-in-a-thousand year storms that would be significantly worse than the century storms. The people that hire engineers always need to decide what standard they're going to build to and they normally choose a century-storm standard as being optimum given that the structure is not likely to be in use any longer than that anyway. If they were built to withstand a millenium storm, they'd be a whole lot more expensive but that extra expense would be very hard to justify to the people that pay for the bridge.
With respect to a city, it's harder to know how long it will be there and what its boundaries will be over that time, making it harder to decide what it might have to endure in terms of weather.

I'm not sure the voters would have been happy spending the millions of
dollars needed to be ready for a day like this.
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Exactly. There are going to be plenty of people saying "You're building this against the worth storm in 500 years? But I'm not going to live that long! Couldn't you build something a little less durable and let the next generation upgrade it?"

You can't prevent but you sure as hell can do a better job to prepare.
Instead politicians will just wave their hands and blame "climate change".

 Well it's easier to do that than to fight the voters to spend the
money where it is needed on the off chance they get multiple fires
going at once. I'm not saying they shouldn't have spent the money.
Just that you know the voters would have fought them on it.

--
Rhino